Prospectus

Tentative Title:

Communication Theory: Responding to Globalization, Pluralism and Collaborative Needs

Authors:

Stanley Deetz, Ph. D.

Department of Communication

University of Colorado

Boulder, CO 80309-0270

303-492-1673 (o); 303-499-4120 (h); 303-492-8411 (f)

stanley.deetz@colorado.edu

http://comm.colorado.edu/deetz

Gary P. Radford, Ph. D.

Department of English, Communication, and Philosophy

M-MS3-01

Fairleigh Dickinson University

Madison, NJ 07940

973-443-8378 (o); 973-267-7996 (h); 973-443-8713 (f)

gradford@fdu.edu

http://alpha.fdu.edu/~gradford

Length: 300 pages

Expected completion: March 2006

Level:

The book is pulls together rather sophisticated contemporary scholarly writings regarding communication and society from a critical postmodernist perspective, but is written in a style and at a level filled with examples so that an educated lay person or midlevel college student could read it with fascination and pleasure.

Content:

This book begins with a basic premise: Both social scientific and everyday life theories are created and used in response to particular practical problems faced by individuals, communities and societies. The nature of those theories is related to the nature of the problems. Since theories over time become institutionalized in various ways, as core problems change existing theories become less useful and can lead to the repetition of faulty responses. This can be seen in a basic way in the use of psychological conceptions and linear communication models to deal with what might be better conceived of as systemic social problems.

Mobility, globalization, communication technologies, and a host of other social changes, have created a new set of human problems which require a new way of thinking about communication if they are to be productively addressed. These problems, and the opportunities embedded in them, arise from pluralism and interdependence in human communities that must make decisions together and the rapid expansion of mediated over relatively direct experiences. Together these provide a rather fragmented and conflict-filled life situation potentially requiring endless negotiation and collaboration and subject to new and often invisible mechanism of control. Both social scientific and native theories of communication were never designed to address this type of a situation. Everyday life theories have a strong sense of self and a weak conception of the other and otherness. A conflict-based theory of communication provides a different understanding and different practices of communication enables open invention in relationships and greater creative collaboration in decision making.

This book is a response to this situation. Over the past several years, various authors loosely lumped together as social constructionists have provided the conceptual tools to attend to and carefully describe the contemporary social context. The personal is seen as the outcome rather than origin of social processes and deeply political. The more interesting processes of communication today are the production of social meanings rather than processes of expression and effects. Rather than assuming that meaning is fixed and ready to be expressed, meaning is a fluid, a tension filled produced outcome. Postmodern writers have shown with ever-deeper acumen the complex nature of production, contestation, and reproduction of human experience.

The book will build on these insights as a response to contemporary communication situations, but with a critical edge. Social construction always takes place within particular power configurations. Power may be more or less balanced enabling either free and open production of meaning or systematically distorted ones. The more mediated the production of experience the more subtle and consequential power imbalance can be. Here critical theory, and especially Habermas’ ideal speech situation, is used heuristically (without a claim of universality or consensus production) as a provisional human choice for reclaiming the contestable and responding to pluralism, interdependence, and the need to make mutually satisfactory decision together. Adding a critical edge to postmodernism focuses more clearly on inclusion and reclaiming suppressed and the need for diverse interdependent people to make concrete choices together.

The book is not intended to survey and review the contributions of these developments but rather to use the insights from different positions to build an intuitive way of thinking and talking about communication that enables the reader to rethinking the process of interacting with others, to attend to the subtle processes of meaning and decision production, and finally, to invent more collaborative processes of interaction. The theoretical perspective being developed is less a theory about communication, than a communication theory of social life. Communication is more a mode of explanation than a process to be explained.

The first half of the book develops the new context that communication theorizing has to address and the contours of a communication perspective on this. The second half of the book takes this way of thinking and talking into the routine situations of life showing a way to understand these situations and the advanced of thinking of them in different way. This will include consideration of interpersonal interaction, interaction and decision making within organizations and technologically and mass mediated interaction.

We see human interaction as inevitably political and thus we are explicit about our moral commitments. Readers will be asked to examine their theories and processes of interaction and knowledge construction in light of a moral commitment to inclusion and shared decision-making. The book asks for personal courage to identify and challenge assumptions behind ordinary ways of perceiving, conceiving and acting and to recognize the influence of history, culture and social positioning on perceptions, meanings and actions. The book like most critical works holds that power and authority relations and their impact on decision-making are real, gendered, classed, institutionalized, and evoked/enforced by specific others in specific ways. But also holds out a reformist hope that is often absent or less explicit in other critical work. And, this reformist hope is carried through with cases and discussion of system interventions.

As a society we have a choice. We can continue the culture wars and facilitate trends in cultural management and the culture industries toward homogenization and cultural imperialism of various sorts. Or we can figure out ways to build creative and mutually satisfying worlds together. We stand on the side of the latter. But to even think of this as a possibility let along make it a potential practice requires a rethinking of communication theorizing at a level of potential public impact. This is our goal.

The Market:

The proposed text grows out of a large sophomore lecture course in communication theory. The materials developed for this course attempted to meet several needs that are not jointly met by any existing text. While we do not conceive of this as a textbook in any ordinary sense, we intend to write a book that draws on students and others natural intellectual interests and provides a challenging development of insight into communication processes. We think of this as a boundary-spanning book able to be read at several levels a bit like James Carey’s Communication and Culture.

The book could be used in upper-level undergraduate or beginning graduate-level courses in communication theory, especially by those wanting move beyond the rather standard materials of the field, but also read by professionals in the field interested in the impact of the new mostly European-based theories of communication and how they might be brought out of the philosophical realm and address concrete communication situations. We intend a discussion that is immediately accessible and relevant to contemporary life experience. The book will take a very different approach from most textbooks in communication. The book is proposed as more a window on the world than an overview of the work of the field. Stories describing everyday events and giving intuitive insights into complex processes organize the book’s development rather than classification schemes and lists. (See section on stories below).

The biggest trick of connecting communication theory to everyday life is not how to make theory practical but how to overcome conceptions of theory that separate theory from practice. The book works less as an answer to questions like “What do we know or need to know about communication?” than to questions like “What would be the consequence of knowing that?” “What would I see or do if I thought that to be the case?”

Theory is thus thought of as a lens on the world rather than as an abstract mirror of it; a way of thinking and talking about the world rather than a representation of it. Good theory draws our attention to differences that make a difference, helps us recognize patterns among these observations, and enables a connection between observations and responses. It is not about the world but in the world. The book hopes to enrich the everyday ways of talking and thinking about communication by providing a more useful vocabulary. This vocabulary is theory; it is not drawn from theory, it is a different way of being in the world. The book investigates the political nature of thoughts, feeling and actions and aims at revitalizing social decision making processes.

We hope to develop an active interest in the complexity of the social contexts and processes being studied, rather than reviewing findings regarding these context and processes. We intend to develop a general theory and treatment that cuts across communication contexts and shows the isomorphic issues and problems rather than being constrained to the vocabulary of a particular subarea of the field.

Further, the new communication theories developed in Europe are having a great impact in the field, on other disciplines, and in broader intellectual contexts. This impact is greatest in the areas of language theories, culture and identity production, and generally on the politics of meaning. If these are covered at all in general communication theory volumes they are treated a simply additional perspectives on certain issues rather than challenging communication studies in a deeper and more fundamental way. Texts that do not treat these new concepts take communication studies out of the contemporary intellectual debates at the very time communication has become a major issue within them.

Finally, communication theory should be understood in relation to larger social issues and policy questions. Communication study is a liberal art in the sense that it is essential to the understanding of the nature of human beings and human choice within historical contexts. Concepts of human rights, democracy, and groups relations have always been at their core communication issues. The centrality of communication is clearer today even though our studies have often lost their social context. The proposed text positions the study of communication within the continued development of democratic institutions and treats value and policy questions as a necessary and natural adjunct to descriptive theory building.

The Use of Stories:

Since using stories to show how new theories offers memorable new ways of seeing and talking about life experiences is not a common pedagogical strategy, let us provide two examples here. The first is relatively simple and the second very complex.

Issue 1. Understanding the political nature of everyday information (why information is neither neutral nor transparent) and the possibility of reopening discussion.

Maria’s children (probably like many others) preferred breakfast cereals that she found to be less than ideal. She also noticed that, morning after morning, her children re-read the same boxes from which they poured the cereal. While an odd reading behavior, from what she could tell, nothing on the boxes was untruth and some of it was based on good scientific analysis. The happy children and characters depicted on the boxes resembled her own; the nutritional information seemed sound. While it all seemed ordinary, much was also missed, however.

She finally, decided to replace these boxes with clear plastic containers where she could insert her own text. She put in pictures of overweight, dumpy children who had eaten a lot of sugar cereals, she recorded the likely percent of the added nutrients that the body would process, she included descriptions of the labor practices of the producing company, she recorded the percent of the cereal price that was paid to farmers, and if she disliked the cereal she included the amount of rat hair allowed by the Food and Drug Administration.

When she told this story to others, many people worried about the manipulation of her children and her politicizing of everyday information. They missed both the point and effect. She did not make the information on the box political; it already was political. But, did she manipulate her children? She could have, as could have the manufacturers or the FDA. She could be using her parental power to enforce her preference on her children. But her act was different than that of the manufacturers or government. Their power and privilege appeared natural and invisible, as without a politics. It invited internalization rather than discussion. Maria’s text was “extra-ordinary” and brought the assumed ordinary text and meanings back to discussion. Breakfast conversations were enlivened as they discussed what is worth knowing, and what they would find of value to know. The children wrote their own text for her cereal.

And, the family learned lessons of science and truth. Knowing that the information on the cereal box was politicized did not make it good or bad knowledge. All data, whether scientific or not, is value-laden and produced with certain assumptions and hence political. Information is not to be dismissed as “unscientific” because it has a political dimension. But truth per se was not the issue. Post (Kellogg, General Mills…), government agencies, Maria and her children have different preferences and produced (and reproduced) different truths. None were more noble or evil by producing a truth or even a particular truth. The important communication questions focus on the character and quality of the discussion that is enabled. Falsity makes for bad discussions, so does privileging particular truths. But, the appearance that no discussion is needed is the greatest problem.

Issue 2: Understanding the power relations in the discursive construction of experience and the possibilities of consent and discursive closure.

Consider the following events from last summer. Paul was taking a walk on a mountain trail in Boulder Colorado with Matilda, a visiting six-year old Vietnamese girl from Sweden. In a rather ordinary occurrence in Boulder they encountered a man walking a large very friendly dog who enthusiastically greeted them. Matilda immediately hid behind Paul’s legs. As might be expected the man quickly began assuring them that it was a “nice” dog and that they need not be “afraid.” They went on and the event might easily have been forgotten had Paul not started thinking when Matilda explained to her mother that she was afraid of dogs. Was Matilda “afraid” of dogs?

Imagine for a moment the situation from Matilda’s perspective. Imagine that you have had few experiences with dogs. Stand for a moment at the same height as the dog when it runs up and barks. Imagine a mouth opening at about two-thirds the size of your head filled with long white teeth letting out a sound at that distance of over 120 dbs, loud enough to cause ringing in the ears. With the sound comes a spray of fluids that smell pretty bad and clearly this animal wants to get close and lick you among other things, a new experience at least to her. Any of us put in such an unfamiliar place as she would be filled with physiological responses and lots of thoughts and feelings ranging from surprise and wonderment to senses of weirdness and repulsion.

Clearly the dog owner has few if any of these experiences, he is not in the same place as her and comes with a ready made cultural package specifying thought, feelings, rights, responsibilities and expectations. What is of interest here is not the difference of he and Matilda or even the overlooking of the differences, but the quickness by which he defines Matilda’s experience for her. She is to learn that this not-yet-determined-surge-of-stuff going on is to be understood as “fear,” that she is responsible for the feeling, and that she is deficient for having it. She has consented; other’s meanings have become her meanings; she has no space to choose.

Communication has fallen to subtle imperialism. If the power was more balanced or the possibility to talk and explore available, she might object saying that she was not afraid, that the dog startled her, that she found the experience disgusting, or even that the dog was a good size to eat. She might want to talk to work out what all these strange feelings are or will come to be. But no communication space exists to work out or into expression the complex array of not-yet-determined thoughts and feelings which could be made determinant in multiple often complex and conflicting ways. And, neither Paul, nor the dog owner, are able to engage with her in talk that might challenge their own cultural understandings.

The primary difficulty is not just of power, size or expression abilities. Rather, the form of talk (and the theories of communication and experience on which it is based) presents a type of closure and sense of being sealed off that would make any consideration of alternative ways of knowing and experience difficult. The description of the experience is expressed as natural, culturally neutral and in no need of discussion or examination. She has a psychological state, a problem, not a culturally produced experience, one produced in conditions of power unbalance.

The difficulty of this talk is not just the domination of Matilda experience but the loss of the dog owner’s capacity to explore his own culturally prescribed experience. Would he have experienced this in this way had he been able to explore alternatives? And, without the ability to discuss the various experiential possibilities, open mutual decisions around even fairly simply issues like the construction of trails and policies for multiple uses become difficult. And if these things become contentions the conflicts stay at a difficult to resolve surface level rather than enabling the contestation of experience and the exploration of creative options. Difference or “distantiation” is required to explore alternatives and produce creative decisions. But difference had no place here.

Brief Biographic Sketches

Stanley Deetz is Professor of Communication and Director of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Prior to joining the CU faculty in 1997, he taught for several years at Rutgers University, chairing the department there during the 1980’s.

Deetz specializes in the study of alternative communication theories and their consequences for studying and changing organizations. His studies of commercial and community organizations have provided a theoretical understanding of organizational governance and decision making with the intent of promoting a more in-depth understanding of various organizational forms and encouraging the exploration of alternative more collaborative communication practices. Normatively this work attempts to produce governance structures, decision processes and communicative practices that lead to more inclusive, collaborative, and creative decisions, more satisfying work experiences, and more positive consequences for the wider society. His current research primarily focuses on relations of power in work sites and the way these relations are produced and reproduced in everyday interaction.

He is author of Leading Organizations through Transitions (Sage 2000), Doing Critical Management Research (Sage 2000), Transforming Communication, Transforming Business (Hampton, 1995) and Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization: Developments in Communication and the Politics of Everyday Life (SUNY, 1992), and editor or author of 8 other books. He has published over 100 essays in scholarly journals and books regarding stakeholder representation, decision-making, culture, and communication in corporate organizations and has lectured widely in the U.S. and Europe.

He was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at Goteborgs Universitet (Sweden, 1994), and has held visiting appointments at Arizona State University, the University of Texas, the University of Iowa, and the Copenhagen Business School. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association serving as its President, 1996-97, and has held many other elected professional positions. In 2004 he received the National Communication Association Distinguished Scholar Award (a lifetime achievement award). He is also an active consultant and does training and development work for companies in the U.S. and Europe.

Gary P. Radford is Professor of Communication Studies and Director of the MA in Corporate and Organizational Communication at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersey. He is the author of On the Philosophy of Communication (Wadsoworth, 2005), On Eco (Wadsworth, 2003), and Transgressing Discourses: Communication and the Voice of Other (with Michael Huspek) (SUNY Press, 1997), and the Editor of the Atlantic Journal of Communication, a fully blind and peer reviewed journal in the field of Communication Studies. Radford’s work proactively inserts the works of Michel Foucault into the discursive formations of contemporary communication theory, library and information science, and cognitive psychology. He is currently writing a book entitled A Genealogy of the Threshold.

Preliminary Outline

Communication Theory: Responding to Globalization, Pluralism and Collaborative needs

By Stanley Deetz and Gary Radford

PART I SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND COMMUNICATON THEORIZING

Chapter 1 Theorizing as an Everyday Activity

A. Theorizing: An ongoing activity in everyday life based in forming pragmatic solutions to everyday problems which are themselves formed out of pre-understandings. Every one is a social scientist.

1. Implicit Theories, Changing World, and Window Bashing

a. Ways of attending to, talking about and responding to the world

and exist in every perception, conception and action

b. Provide recipe-like solutions for everyday problems

c. Shared as common sense

d. Exist as our relatively invisible cultural scripts

e. But as pragmatic solutions to problems at their time of invention they can lead to repetitive failure based on mis-match between cultural scripts and contemporary circumstances

B. A Tradition of Theory in Use

1. Aristotle and practical wisdom

2. John Dewey and theory in use

C. Communication Theorizing as Form of Phronesis

1. Theory and life engagement

2. Explicit theorizing

a. Making theories explicit can bring implicit theories to awareness

b. And, permit critical assessments based on testing or examining usefulness

D. Changing Problems, Changing Theories: When the social situations change, implicit theories fail more often and assessment and invention become more important.

1. Interdependence and Pluralism: Mobility, rapid life changes, globalization, pluralism, expansion of mediation and symbolic events, and communication technology development provide a situation far different from what current implicit theories were developed to manage.

2. Rapid growth of mediation.

3. Will we invent new systems of control or new forms of collaborative talk and decision making.

Chapter 2. Fundamental Historical Issues in Thinking about Communication

1. Theories can be seen as differing along two different dimensions one focused on the motive of communicative and the other on the model of communication. Put together they provide four ideal types of communication theories each attuned to specific perceived historical needs.
2. The communication motive continuum—strategy control to mutual decision making

1. Strategic control

a. Influence over others

b. Strategic planning of messages

c. The efficient transmission and reproduction of meaning

2. Mutual decision making

a. Communication as the joint production of meaning

b. The representation of different interests in coming to agreement

4. The choice of motives is based each period’s conception of democracy and administration

a. The ancient beginning in the Greek polis—participative truth in the dialectic with rhetoric as its handmaiden

b. The Roman preoccupation with administration—the effectiveness of the good man speaking well

c. The Church and divine right of kings—effectiveness in spreading the word

d. Reformation and Revolution—rationality and participation in relation to God and fellowmen (the Greek revival)

e. Liberal democracy—effectiveness as gathering a constituency (market) emphasizing the speaker, freedom of speech, and the press (the Roman revenge)

(1) The development of the concept of the "informed" public

(2) The growing fear of the duped public

f. The communication revolution of the '60's: The "revolt of the listener" —blacks, women, children & worker gain "voice" as well as "forum"

(1) problems with the "effects" model politically and descriptively

(2) the recognition of the politics of language

(3) growth of interpersonal and nonverbal study as political acts

C. The Communication model continuum—Expressionism to social constructionism

1. Expressionism:

a. Fixed meanings, linear models, transmission focus

b. Quality communication equals fidelity; failures are breakdowns

2. Social constructionism: Interrelated emergent meanings

a. Meaning is systemic

b. Interaction as an open transforming system

c. Interactants' "meanings" are usually unclear and multiple

d. Interaction has no clear starting and stopping point.

d. Interaction goals are negotiated and transformed throughout the interaction.

e. Meaning is multileveled.

(1) Metacommunication: content, contextual frames, and relational rights and responsibilities

(2) Message complexity and embeddedness

f. Quality communication equals coordination of meanings

D. The four quadrants

1. Administrative—most fully developed in organizational compliance gaining, persuasion, public relations, and marketing

2. Liberal democracy—mostly fully developed in representative government and the US judicial system.

3. Cultural management—most fully in cultural change programs, unobtrusive control processes and culture industries.

4. Participatory democracy—most fully developed in some collaborative and team decision processes and in creative problem solving

E. The current context increases the situations where participatory democracy provides more viable communication theories.

Chapter 3 The Endless Negotiation of Identity, Social Order, Knowledge and Values

A. Elaborating the conditions calling for new ways of talking and thinking about communication

B. Interaction in homogeneous communities

1. The implied consensus and the implicit reproduction of identities, social order, knowledge and values

2. The process of fixation and naturalization

C. Interaction in heterogeneous communities

1. Identity negotiation

a. Mobility, occupational change, declining traditional communities, and changing roles leading to fragmentation, role conflicts, and freedom.

b. Moving from integrated and unitary identities based on fixed positions of gender, class, and occupational roles to negotiation.

c. Being whatever you can negotiate—managing identities and being managed.

2. Social order negotiation

a. The decline of accepted authority, perceived legitimacy of rules, community surveillance, and voluntary compliance.

b. With interrelated pluralistic communities, whose rules? Or why natural rights concepts fail.

c. New attempts to build accepted orders and new controls versus constructing mutually acceptable temporary negotiated orders

3. Knowledge negotiation

a. Knowledge as certainty and the belief that the right experts can get it right.

b. Facts as artifacts—the products of accepted but value-laden procedures

c. Conflict over whose procedures and the growth of relativism where opinions substituting for knowledge. “The loudest is the rightist.”

d. Defeating relativism and negotiating knowledge claims through value discussion.

4. Value negotiation

a. Lack of policies in traditional societies owing to shared values and “grand narratives” providing integration.

b. Efficiency standards and “performativity” substituting for shared goals.

c. The question of “whose ends, whose goals?” in a pluralistic society and the contested definition of progress.

d. Policies as negotiated agreements as to how we will live together.

D. Living with ontological insecurity

1. The stress of choice—anxiety comes with making it up rather than taking it for granted.

2. One can run from this anxiety, try to institute new systems of cultural control, and reclaim the homogeneous community or develop better means of negotiation.

3. New control systems provide tenuous and unstable securities.

4. How to live with fundamental conflicts and constant negotiation is the most critical question of our time but require a new way of thinking and talking about communication.

PART II COMMUNICATON THEORIZING FOR PARTICPATORY DEMOCRACY

Chapter 4. The Process and Politics of Human Experience

A. Why liberal democracy leads us astray

1. Freedom of speech as a necessary but not sufficient condition for mutual production of meaning and decisions.

a. Why “voice” rather than having a say matters

b. The politics of experience

c. The fixation of meaning and expressionism

d. The manufacturing of consent

2. Problems with the marketplace of ideas

a. Lack of adequate accessible forums

b. “megaphone” size differences

c. Lack of assurance of critical ideas

3. Problems with the adversarial models of interaction

a. Attention to expression and understanding rather than decisions

b. Lack of win/win creativity

4. Rights, representation and keeping us safely apart rather than productively together

B. People as interpretive creatures—Seeing is always “seeing as”

1. Perceptions, thought and feelings are social products based on the institutionization and reproduction of physical and interpretive practices.

2. The social/historical direction of attention

a. Experience arise from a floating “I/eye.” Perception is always positional and positionality is socially borrowed.

b. Instincts as historical learning; linguistic distinction as historical learning (a way of encountering or being the world)

c. Language and other social institutions as memories of past social solutions

2. The politics of experience

a. Whose meaning, whose experience is it?

b. The self as an “I,” “me,” and “image”

c. The fixing of identity and problems of the psychological concept of the person

C. Productive and reproductive interactions

1. Productivity and creativity in meaning formation—the demand of “otherness”

a. Conflict with dominant “I” positions (fixed “me’s)

b. The expanded and complex “me”

2. Unobtrusive reproductions—my world is the world and now your world

3. Obtrusive reproductions—compliance, persuasion and influence

4. Simulations and deep acting: the growing confusion of unobtrusive and obtrusive interactions

Chapter 5 Toward an Adequate Way of Thinking and Talking About Language

1. Alternative Conceptions of Language and its Relation to the World
2. Representational views (linear/control reproduction models)

a. Objectivism, empiricism, or the scientific view

Person Language World

<-------------<-------------<---------------<----------

Blank slate Mirror Fixed objects

b. Subjectivism, rationalism, or the humanist view

Person Language World

>------------->------------->--------------->----------

Mental Tool Stuff

constructs

c. Misconception of language as a tool-like representation system

(1) The indefinite character of the object of representation

(2) The speed of language learning

(3) The nature of linguistic mistakes

C. Constitutive views—beyond objectivism and subjectivism

a. Trans-subjectivism, social constructionism, or the postmodern view

Person Language World

<-----------<------->------<-------->-------<-------->

Interests Lens Elements

b. Language as value-laden rather than a transparent medium

(1) The production of distinction

(2) Linguistic attention and inattention

(3) Language as leading and trailing experience

c. “Duality” or “double articulation”—Language constitutes the objects/feelings/meanings it appears to represent

d. Language is a system of distinctions or “differences that make a difference”—Words say what it is and what it is not, at once

(1) Phonetic system and distinctive feature analysis

(2) Syntactic systems and generative, transformational grammar

(3) Semantic systems and dimensions of distinction

(a) constructs

(b) metaphors

(4) Pragmatic systems and division of language actions

(a) illocutionary force

(b) constitutive rules and felicity conditions (“x” counts as doing “y” in context “z”)

e. Language as a collection of historical decisions

(1) The case for the white male domination of linguistic distinction

(2) Cognitive and emotive languages

Chapter 6 The Consequences for Explicit Communication Theorizing

A. Alternative views of theory development

a. Assumptions are the price of any organized thinking about life

b. Assumptions as core to everyday life and scientific knowledge

(see chart)

(1) Ontological assumptions

(2) Epistemological assumptions

(3) Axiological assumptions

c. The "lens" versus the "mirror" as the principal metaphors for theory

d. Value-free or value-laden theorizing

B. Theories as abstractions—The mirror of nature

a. Methodological forgetfulness of social constructionism

b. Importance of definitions and specification of domain

c. Processes of generalization and hypothesis testing, Wallace Circle

d. Goals of explanation, prediction, and control

C. Theory as a way of seeing and thinking—Edification and generative positioning

a. Directing attention to differences that matter

b. Organizing experience

c. Enabling useful responses

d. The relation of power and knowledge

D. Communication as a mode of explanation

Chapter 7 Developing Normative Guidance for Participatory Communication

A. The need for normative standards (What is “good” communication?)

1. Effectiveness is at best a partial criteria

2. The failure of "free speech" and "marketplace of ideas" to provide for open participation

a. The limited access marketplace and difficulties of the public hearing all relevant positions—the forum issue

b. The politics of control verses the politics of experience consent (known and unknown censorship)—the voice issue

3. The promotion of self understanding and open social choices

4. The direction of policy choices

5. The examination of hidden systems of control

B. The development of a normative foundation for free and open communication

1. Analysis of the pragmatic presumptions of everyday conversation

a. Strategic communication (effectiveness model) versus consensus (conversation) and orientation to reaching understanding (participation model)

b. Self, other, world and language relations in each communication situation and the illocutionary force of each

2. Socially shared foundations for dispute resolution or “discourse” based in performative claims: Symmetrical opportunities and power equity, truthfulness, truth, correctness

3. The relation to contestation of identity, social order, knowledge and values

C. Systematically distorted communication

1. Conflict suppression

2. Ideology, imaginary relations, and truthiness

a. Normalizing experience

b. Substituting of images for experience

c. Substituting definitions for concepts

d. Partiality of development

3. Random, inevitable distortions and structural systemic ones

4. Self-referential systems

5. Discourse blockages

a. Disqualification

b. Naturalization

c. Neutralization

d. Topical avoidance

e. Subjectification of experience

f. Meaning denial

D. Reopening conversation through redeemable strategies

1. Meta-communication

2. Rhetoric

3. Strategic action

PART III INTERACTION CONTEXTS

Chapter 8 Interpersonal Interaction

A. Conceptualizing interpersonal interaction as a meaning producing system

1. Coordinated meaning as an ongoing accomplishment

2. The alignment of meaning, nonalignment of meaning and the possibility of negative cycles and systematic distortion

3. The reproduction of consent in meaning production

B. System determinants of meaning

1. Taken for granted knowledge

a. Indexicality

b. Relationships as knowledge producers

2. Coherence expectations

a. Relevancy

b. Quantity

c. Clarity

d. Truthfulness

3. Standard interpretive pattern frames

a. Episodes

b. Scripts

4. Relationship roles and personal identity

a. Symmetrical and asymmetrical roles

b. Casting and reproduction of patterns

c. Negotiation of self: active and ongoing

d. Confirmation, rejection, and disconfirmation

C. Systematic distortions in interpersonal systems

1. Mixed messages and meaning denial

2. Undesired repetitive patterns (URPs)

a. Games

b.Codependency in relationships

3. Confusion of content and identity issues

D. Planning for more open participation

1. Detecting problem situations

2.Preplanning for managing situations

3.Assessing changes

E. Developing collaborative communication processes

1. Interactants pursue self-interests versus being joint problem solvers.

2. Speaking comes from a position or preferred means of accomplishment versus speaking comes from an outcome wishing to be accomplished.

3. Free and open communication and the prospects of win-win decisions.

Chapter 9 Organizational Communication Systems

A. Social effects of organizations on communication

1. Large organizations maintain control of media & information systems

2. Effects on identity due to institutional centrality

3. Identity defined by title, not products produced

4. Effects on social thinking and decision-making—codependency

B. Organizational structure and communication networks

1. Linear Effectiveness Issues

a. Amount of information distribution

b. Accuracy and relevancy of information received

2. Types of networks (vertical/horizontal, formal/informal message systems)

a. Authority and upward and downward messages

b. Other large number of possible configurations: status, friendships, expertise

c. The networked organization

3. Issues of forums and voice in light of competitiveness and value-addedness

a. The emergence of cross-functional teams

b. The need creativity, commitment, compliance and customization

C. Organizational culture and cultural management

1. Shared norms, values, and routines reproduced in communicative micropractices

a. Culture is naturalized & invisible

b. Culture is a complex phenomenon

c. Culture is constantly changing

2. The micro-practices processes of cultural reproduction

a. The interaction of national and organizational cultures

b. Issues of content and strength of cultures

c. Sense-making and framing (narratives)

d. The crises of control and new forms of control

e. Identity, identification, decisional premises and unobtrusive control processes

f. Consent and devices of discourse closure

3. Instrumental reasoning, decisional routines, skewing and systematically distortion in decisions: Reason for and reasons given for decisions.

4. Are some cultures better?

D. Systematic Distortion and Representation of Interests in Organizations

1. The false distinction between doing good and doing well.

2. New forces transforming the thinking about organizations.

a. Social—the continued expansion of globalization and pluralism

b. Economic—distributed expertise and benefits of decisions at the point of production

c. Political—decline of older social contract, shifting risks and rights of risk-takers, and expanding stakeholder rights

d. Moral—scandals, loss of stewardship, and expanding corporate social responsibility

3.New models of governance and communication

a. Shift from centralization to decentralization of power

b. Growth of collaboration

c. Stakeholder conceptions

Chapter 10 Technologically Mediated Interaction

A. Technologies as political institutions

1. The politics of sensuality (technologies as embodied “I/eyes”)

2. Availability of expression routines

3. Access to data and channels of expression

B. Innovations in computer and data management technologies

1. High speed computing and massive storage capacity

2. The satellite, optical fiber, and interconnectedness

3. Substitution of electronic for transportation connectedness

C. Human changes

1. More and potentially more varied data

2. Rapid decision-making, more reactive and less responsive

3. Global response to massive events

4. More economic and fewer political choices

5. Larger more international and integrated organizations

6. New jobs and forms of expertise

7. Substitution of information for knowledge and wisdom

D. Data/Information overload problem

1. More is better versus appropriate is better

2. Unchanging human processing capacity and rapidly increasing potential input

3. Filters and bottlenecks

4. Queuing and systems to monitor and select

E. Economic versus public utility conceptions of technological development

1. Is information too valuable to be owned and control by a few in a democracy?

2. Do developments lead by market conditions meet social needs?

3. Does the market-driven technological development expand social asymmetry?

F. Data bases and data retrieval systems

1. The relation of the user, intermediary, and storage system

2. Understanding user purposes, needs, and data preferences

3. Interactivity, indexes and the processes of connecting users with appropriate data

4. Issues in storage: What can be stored? What is stored?

G. Promises and probabilities of the new technologies in regard to free and open versus systematically distorted communication

1. Greater integration of technologies

a. System vulnerability

b. Problems of centralization and privacy

c. Problems of costs

2. Greater user selection through greater variety, channels, and convenience

a. The potential for moving choices from providers to users

b. The possibility of narrowing through routinization and tunneling

b. Reduced social contact outside the virtual world

3. Greater interactivity leading to greater market segmentation and systems of control

4. Greater public information

a. Access limited to those familiar with data retrieval

b. Access limited to those affording data retrieval

c. Storage and system bias as to type of information

H. Potential effects of communication technologies on participation

1. Issues of access to both data producing as well as data retrieval capacities, the universal service debate

2. Preferences for certain data forms and ideologically based systems

3. The difficulties of/finding sorting well formed information in the babble of opinions

4. The lack of discussion making possible “productive” communication and social consensus rather than dominant opinions

Unit 11 Mass Mediated Interaction

A. Issues in ownership, commercial sponsorship and the nature of mass communication

B. Technological convergence and the integration of mediation

C. The relation of mass media to society: making news, keeping an audience

1. Theories of the press and the collapse of the public sphere

5. Objective reporting and the marketplace of ideas and new forms of censorship

6. Mediation and the sponsorship of news, knowledge and information

4. Interpretive frames and the construction of the news

5. The merging of advertising, entertainment, and news

6. The outcome of systematic skewing: hegemony

7. The construction of public memory

D. Dominant values of media and ideology reproduction

1. Perpetuation of positive consumer lifestyle due to increase in product acquisition

2. Legitimation of private production, deprecating public activity

3. Emphasis on action orientation, deprecating reason and discussion

4. Normalization of group conflicts

5. Individualism and individual solutions

E. The media audience

1. Possibility of oppositional readings and resistance (Soap opera research)

2. The growth of cynicism and loss of criticism

3. Media as escape

4. The viewing experience as a social activity

F. The new responsibilities for free and open communication

1. Reclaiming value debate

2. The possibilities of a new public sphere

3. Media literacy and criticism

Communication Theory: Responding to Globalization, Pluralism and Collaborative Needs

Stanley Deetz and Gary Radford

Chapter One

Theorizing as an Everyday Activity

Everyday life is filled with the endless attempt to solve problems and accomplish goals. People borrow and create ways of perceiving the world. They apply concepts and recipes for acting in the world and use systems of evaluation. While not normally conceptualized in this way, such activity can usefully be thought of as theorizing. Most of the time, everyday theorizing is implicit; that is, it is carried out with little or any conscious reflection or testing. Sometimes implicit theorizing is highly functional and sometimes it fails. Often, however, because everyday theorizing remains implicit, it cannot be examined and success or failure is rarely attributed to it. But much can be gained by considering the theorizing process. In these times of rapid social and technological change, examination of everyday theorizing is becoming increasingly important.

This chapter looks at the everyday, ordinary process of theorizing. First, it will show that theorizing is connected to the attempt to accomplish practical goals and deal with routine choice and problems. As such it is a practically guided manner of attending to, thinking and talking about, and responding to life events. Second, everyday theorizing will be shown as being developed with and borrowed from others and becomes a form of “common sense” (our sense in common). It is a way of being in the world. Third, since everyday theorizing is practical, it is attached to the conditions in which it was formed. As a result, changing environments and circumstances can lead common sense to be dysfunctional. In times of fundamental and/or rapid change, implicit theories become increasingly dysfunctional and explicit reconsideration is important with explicit attention to the changes and options for addressing new circumstances and needs in practical ways. The chapter ends by sketching the changes that lead to a need to investigate and assess the most basic everyday theories of communication and begin inventing new ones in response to everyday needs.

Implicit Theories, Changing Worlds and Window Bashing

Complex relations are often best revealed in stories. Imagine living in a glass house. The nice thing about glass houses is their organic relation to the outside, the blurring of the inside and outside. The bad thing about glass houses is the confusion it creates for the local bird population. Such confusion is usually just annoying for both birds and homeowners. Occasionally birds bang into windows, brush themselves off, and fly away and homeowners are startled but return to routine life. But systemic problems can also exist.

Imagine a homeowner awaking with a cardinal continually bashing into a bedroom window for a half an hour or so each morning as the sun comes up. While this is not a terribly important problem in the grand scheme of things, it is a genuine problem nevertheless and one that can show much about theorizing. The immediate thoughts of the homeowner might be in terms of the cardinal being “stupid” and “unfortunate.” After all, can’t this poor creature understand that glass is solid? Isn’t this bird able to learn from past experience and realize that the glass will be there and will not go away no matter how many times she tries to fly through it? Doesn’t the bird have the sense to know when to stop? While such thinking on the part of the homeowner may provide some temporary satisfaction in terms of expressing frustration, it does not make any significant progress towards making the cardinal stop crashing into the window or making peaceful mornings.

But reflective time (lying in bed early in the morning can be like that) can lead to very different thoughts. Imagine for a moment that the bird is not stupid but actually very smart. The cardinal, like people, has an implicit and, in the cardinal’s case, instinctual theory. The cardinal observes the situation each morning in a particular way and has a recipe for responding to those observations in order to accomplish a practical end. All ingredients for a theory. From the cardinal’s perspective another bird has invaded the cardinal’s territory (even though we know it to be only her own reflection); the other bird must be attacked and driven away to protect her territory; and from the cardinal’s standpoint, the action is successful. Unfortunately, however, from the cardinal’s standpoint, the other bird returns as she returns to her branch outside the window. The problem thus from the cardinal’s standpoint is the tenacity of the other bird rather her own “theory.” And, the solution is to hit the other bird harder and faster. The cardinal “window bashes” until the rising sun no longer provides the mirror and resolves the problem. If she were human she might feel proud and relieved with her success.

The cardinal, of course, is not the subject of this book. Endless similar human situations and responses, however, are. Like the cardinal people develop theories (means of observation, scripted responses and assessments) over long periods of time in response to the practical problems of their time. For example, two people meet. They pay attention to some things about each other and not others. Each is perceived to have a particular personality, a character or intelligence, for instance. Each makes such observations and choices of action in relation to their practical goals. Different things are attended to in a work group than are attended to at a party.

Such theories are passed across generations in linguistic distinctions, social institutions, laws, buildings and physical layouts. ‘Personality,’ ‘character,’ and ‘intelligence’ become common shared ways to observe and talk about people. And, such notions are passed to new generations that had no part in inventing these ways of observing and talk and who may or may not share in the practical problems that lead to their development. Vocabularies about and ways of testing such things become elaborate and connected to other perceptions. They become a shared stock of recipes and scripts—theories—to go about everyday lives. And they become recursively reproduced in their connection and redundancy with larger vocabularies, discourses and orientations to the world.

The fact that these are historically invented ways of attending to people remains mostly unnoticed. And they remain unnoticed as long as they work well enough in most cases. And generally they will work if the world and practical problems stay the same or if innovation in them happens at the same rate as change.

But as will be developed later, human versions of “window bashing” are also visible and often all too present. Perhaps ‘personality,’ ‘character’ and ‘intelligence’ lead us to attend poorly rather than well to people. People respond to their own mirrors, to the world as seen and attended to, even in their own repetitive failures. The problem most often in repetitive failure is not bad, incompetent or none caring people but good people trying their best but perceiving and responding in a world in less than useful ways. And, the problem is not the theories themselves for each work in the matched context. The problem is a relational one. The homeowner’s discussion of the cardinal as bad or stupid isn’t much more helpful than the cardinal’s theory. Neither can see how they lead to repetitive failure. Most often in life as in the Matrix movies, sensing déjà vu is evidence of a system glitch not an individual problem.

Theories direct attention and responses in different ways. Consider the company with short doors in Box 1.

Legend has it that there once was a company founded by short people. To cut costs and increase efficiency they built their offices with short doors. As they became more successful and expanded their operations they found themselves hiring more and more tall people. While the tall people were good at what they did, they had difficulties fitting in. They bumped their heads on the door jams frequently, they were sometimes late for meetings as they encountered the various obstacles of the offices, and they felt conspicuous and less than welcome.

Being an enlightened company the management team hired the best consultants, those most able to apply their theory to help out. The scientific management consultants taught tall people the most efficient means of walking and ducking, how to pace themselves and measure their steps so that they planted the left foot at the perfect place to lower the head under the door to come up on the right foot without losing stride. Psychological consultants taught the short employees how to show respect and not comment on awkwardness and late arrival at meetings. Special praise was given to those who showed on time. Several exercises were done to increase appreciation of diversity and improve the self-esteem of tall people.

To some extent intervention seemed to work. Retention of tall employees increased. Negative feelings decreased. And, productivity was up. The theories were apparently good and the applications and interventions appropriate. But we still might want to ask why raising the doors was missed by the best theories of the time. The situation is seen differently if the concern is not whether these theories were right, but did these theories direct attention (shape thinking and talking) in the most useful ways. This raises questions of values, goals and aspirations missed in questions of correctness and narrow conceptions of consequences.

The window-bashing cardinal and the short door consultants are examples of theorizing as an everyday activity. Usually the term “theory” is not associated with stories such as this one. “Theory” is most often associated with science and philosophy, which might posit an explicit “theory of the big bang” or a “theory of evolution” that is discussed by scientists and published in monographs and textbooks. The distinction between everyday theory (theory motivated to achieve a specific purpose) and scientific theory (theory motivated to attain knowledge for its own sake) has a long tradition in Western philosophy. As noted by John Dewey, around the time of Plato the scientific mode of theorizing came to become privileged, and the everyday mode of theorizing was relegated and practically forgotten. Reversing this tendency and attending to implicit theories in use can aid in the identification of the consequences of them in the practical contexts of life, help people overcome the mismatches between dominant native theories of communication and contemporary social life, and reclaim a more productive complementary relation to professional theory development.

A Tradition of Theory-in-Use

The idea of “theory-in-use” has can be traced in writings across nearly 2500 years of Western history as diverse as those of Aristotle and John Dewey. These writings begin an articulation of the main themes of everyday theorizing that will inform much of the discussion in this book.

Aristotle and Practical Wisdom

Writing in his Nicomachean Ethics[1], Aristotle (2004) explicitly differentiates between “scientific knowledge” and “practical wisdom.” Aristotle proposed that the rational part of the soul consists of two parts: “one with which we contemplate those things whose first principles are invariable, and one with which we contemplate things which are variable” (p. 145). An example of something that Aristotle considers invariable are the principles of geometry. People may choose to contemplate the judgment that “the sum of the angles of a triangle is or is not equal to two right angles” (p. 151) all they want, but the principle that “the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles” is invariable. It does not change simply because people choose to think about it differently. So it makes no sense to deliberate on the nature of a triangle because “nobody deliberates about things that are invariable” (p. 145). Knowledge about things that are invariable is considered by Aristotle to be scientific.

Of interest in this book is Aristotle’s alternative mode of wisdom known as phronesis, which is defined as knowledge based on prudence, practical wisdom, or common sense. Unlike scientific knowledge, phronesis involves and demands active deliberation and the practical knowledge acquired as a result can always change and grow. Phronesis is not invariable and eternal. It is related to specific circumstances and actions. As Aristotle writes, phronesis “is not concerned with universals only; it must also take cognizance of particulars, because it is concerned with particulars, and conduct has its sphere in particular circumstances” (p. 154). In the story of the window-bashing cardinal, the homeowner is faced with a particular problem and a particular set of circumstances. Through a process of active and informed deliberation, the practical knowledge that is derived becomes useful to achieving a practical end. What is important to the homeowner in this process is not that the knowledge so produced is “true” or “correct,” but rather that the process of deliberation lead to both a desired and mutually beneficial result (i.e., the outcome was beneficial to both the homeowner and the cardinal). As Aristotle (2004) writes, the mark of a person with practical wisdom is “to be able to deliberate rightly about what is good and advantageous” (p. 150). Unlike in the demonstration of eternal scientific principles, temperance is crucial to the act of deliberation. Aristotle notes that phronesis can be “destroyed or perverted by pleasant and painful experiences” (p. 151). So it is important that the process of deliberation be carried out correctly and that the outcome is positive for all. Phronesis is related to “what is conducive to the good life generally” (p. 150). Aristotle writes that a person with phronesis “can envisage what is good for themselves and for people in general” (p. 150) and that “we consider that this quality belongs to those who understand the management of households or states” (p. 150).

For Aristotle, practical common sense knowledge is much more useful than scientific knowledge for dealing with real problems in the day-to-day world. Knowing that “the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles” may get you a good grade on a math test, but only helps in certain everyday life problems. Having a working knowledge of the territorial habits of cardinals will be of much more value to you, given the appropriate circumstances. Aristotle writes, “That is why some people who do not possess theoretical knowledge are more effective in action (especially if they are experienced) than others who do possess it” (p. 154). Phronesis is acquired over time, through trial and error, and through experience. As such, it is not gained easily:

Although the young develop ability in geometry and mathematics and become wise in such matters, they are not thought to develop prudence. The reason for this is that prudence also involves knowledge of particular facts, which become known from experience; and [the young are] not experienced, because experience takes some time to acquire (pp. 155-156).

Phronesis for Aristotle is gained from life experience rather than formal instruction or education. People learn what works and what doesn’t, and the results of these lessons can be carried over into future life experiences. Of course, conceptions of phronesis today are far more complex and varied that that provided by Aristotle but the beginning distinction is a useful point of departure. John Dewey begins the relatively radical reclaiming of the important of phronesis in the 20^th century.

John Dewey and Theory-in-Use

The story of the window-bashing cardinal is instructive about the nature of everyday theorizing because it also demonstrates that theorizing is a part of nature. It is a crucial biological mechanism required for survival. The cardinal’s theory of the “other bird” and its need to attack that bird to drive it away demonstrates this role of theory in survival. Species with good theories tend to survive. Species with poor theories tend to disappear. The relationship between theorizing and biology is a central theme of John Dewey’s Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, in which he makes the case that all aspects of theorizing, regardless of whether or not it is scientific or practical in nature, are ultimately based in the biological necessity for adaptation and survival. Dewey would no doubt approve of our selection of the cardinal’s theorizing as an example of the role of theory, since the cardinal’s theory of “the other bird” demonstrates the intimate relationship between theorizing and an organism’s ability to survive in an every changing environment.

The story of the cardinal also captures a key difference between the theorizing of the cardinal and the theorizing of the homeowner. Whereas the cardinal lives in and responds to a purely physical environment, the homeowner also lives in a cultural environment. The homeowner’s physical conditions are modified by the complex of customs, traditions, and interests which envelops them. Dewey refers to the cultural environment of signs as the common sense environment, or the “world.” Inquiries that take place in making required adjustments in this “world” are “common sense adjustments” (p. 60).

Dewey’s use of the term “common sense” deliberately follows the standard definition of the term such as this one offered by the Oxford English Dictionary: “good sound practical sense in everyday matters” (Brown, 1994, p. 454). However, a second definition of the term “common sense” is equally important to Dewey and also to consideration of theory in this book. This second sense is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as, “the collective sense or judgment of humankind or of a community” (Brown, 1994, p. 454). In this second definition, “common” means “general” – a sense a group of people share in common. “Common sense” designates the conceptions and beliefs that are currently accepted without question by a given group or community. Communities thus share implicit theories both enabling people to have more wisdom than they could acquire their own personal experiences and making the possibilities of “window bashing” common to entire communities and highly resistant to transformation.

Dewey recognized that there are genuine differences between these two conceptions of common sense. But both of them are concerned with the regulation of life in relation to an existing social environment or, as Dewey writes, “both are concerned, one directly and the other indirectly, with the ‘ordinary affairs of life’” (p. 63). The emphasis on the role of theorizing in the “ordinary affairs of life” that connects the tradition of practical wisdom in the writings of Aristotle, Descartes, and Dewey are a central concern of this book. Common sense and everyday theorizing are concerned with situations which continuously arise in the conduct of life and the ordering of day-by-day behavior.

Communication Theorizing as a Form of Phronesis

Interest in implicit everyday theorizing or phronesis in the writings of Aristotle and Dewey provides dilemmas for professional writing about communication. Most books about communication theory operate in a “soft” scientific mode. While they may be less grand then Aristotle’s sense of universality and immutability, they nonetheless are abstracted from life and hope for generality. Examples most often illustrate concepts rather than new ways of thinking and talking used to respond to life contexts. Many theories of communication exist, and many books and journal articles talk about them. Typically, theory is presented as something that is distinct from the world that is theorized about. In this intellectual conception, the notion of theory is always to say something about the world. It is not about how theory works in the world.

Here we are taking a very different look at the relationship between theory and practice using the tradition of phronesis. Theory is as an integral part of living. From the viewpoint of phronesis, theory is that through which participants to take the indeterminant stuff of life and see it as events and problems. The complex processes through which this occurs will be the subject of the next several chapters.

As phronesis, theories are seen as continually mediating the relation of people to their worlds. Therefore, this book is guided by questions such as: “What are the consequences of having this theory as opposed to having some other theory?” What are the practical historical situations in which contemporary theories were developed? How well do they satisfy needs in the contemporary historical situation? Knowledge of communication theory should be able to provide a means of understanding how to live and act in the world. As Aristotle and John Dewey have so persuasively demonstrated, socially constructed and shared theory is necessary to inform and guide everyday behavior and choices. Beyond their conceptions we are interested in the politics of theory construction and reproduction, the manners in which they help some people meet their needs better than others, and how and why common sense is sometimes systematically distorted and dysfunctional. Finally, theorizing in a “scientific” mode can be seen as complementary to phronesis rather than oppositional.

A person’s theory-in-use or phronesis helps people deal with everyday questions and decisions: How do I know what to say to someone I am attracted to? How do I deal with an embarrassing faux pas at a party? How do I approach my boss for a raise or a promotion? What kind of theory do I need to bring to bear in order to deal successfully with situations like these, and countless others? People have goals, utilize concepts of people and situations, and choose actions in response to these goals and conceptions. This is all theory driven behavior and much of this thinking is no more reflective than that of the cardinal, albeit usually with greater success. Communication theory guides actions within a social world made up of other people. It enables people to interact with others, make plans, negotiate meaning, and form self-identities. Communication theory is an activity carried out by people within the social world.

Repetitive Failure and the Mismatch of Theories and Practical Contexts

While ever present and assumed, everyday theories of communication are not infallible. They are not always functional and productive. The poor cardinal crashing into the window is not alone. People also engage in dysfunctional repetitive behavior without the ability to reflect on their implicit theories. Based on the way they perceive people and the scripts available to them, individuals’ can continually enter into relationships that are bad for them without learning from the negative experiences of previous relationships. Employers with high turnover rates can continue to make the same "mistakes" with new employees. Parents and teachers continue to use "failed" discipline techniques. At the societal level, one can see continued faulty and misleading conceptions of people based on their gender, ethnicity, physical attributes, or sexual orientation. People have distorted media images of social life and often have work structures that degrade and limit them. Countries still attack countries when they don’t know how to go to war with terrorist’s internationally networked organizations.

Everyday theories most often fail when people enter new and unfamiliar situations that old scripts do not match or when socially promote theories from the media or other sources provide a readily available but contrived response to situations. For example, new students come to college with an implicit theory of “what college is” and “what is expected of them at college” (Horowitz, 1987[2]; Miller, Bender, Schuh, and Associates, 2005[3]). These theories are invoked to enable students answer such questions as: Should I speak up in class not? When is it okay to skip a class? When is it appropriate to go to office hours? What is expected of me by my professors and my fellow students? The theories students bring to bear to address such questions are based on the real and practical problems they will inevitably confront in the college environment. But, like the cardinal continually flying into the window, sometimes these implicit “theories of college” lead to inappropriate expectations and even dysfunctional behavior. Sometimes students carry high school scripts into college, sometimes they have watch Animal House and Old School too often.

Many new college students find that their implicit theories of college do not match the situation as they actually find it. As Miller (2005[4]) points out:

There are students who move into residence halls thinking that their roommates will become their lifelong friends. Residence hall administrators know that this is usually not the case. The optimism associated with the start of the first semester may have some students anticipating close, warm, and supportive relationships with their instructors and expecting wondrous stimulation in the classroom. Those conditions may unfold, but often they do not. Some students expect to be able to handle the academic responsibilities of college in a way similar to how they did in high school (p. 2).

Many students find that living in the college environment is a radical change from what they were used to at home. As a result, implicit theories of college acquired in the home environment quickly become out of touch with their new college environment. For example, some students enter college life with a theory that tells them that college life consists of “being drunk every night” and “being with lots of people all the time.” Such conceptions may be unrealistic and/or distorted and limit the college experience. A student may enact theories in use that were acquired from others without having chosen them or being able to assess how well they help them accomplish their own interests.

The term “consent” will be developed later to describe those situations where people merely assume as common sense social/historical ways of perceiving and talking as if they were their own without the capacity to talk about them and make new choices. Consider the tail of five monkeys example of concept formation in Box 2. How much of human “choice” is as seemingly obvious and choiceless as that of the monkeys?

An Example of Consent Formation

Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it. Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana. As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all of the monkeys with cold water. After a while, another monkey makes an attempt with the same result—all the monkeys are sprayed with cold water. Pretty soon, when another monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, turn off the cold water. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one. The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs. To his horror, all of the other monkeys attack him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs, he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one. The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked. The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm.

Again, replace a third original monkey with a new one. The new one makes it to the stairs and is attacked as well. Two of the four monkeys that beat him have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs, or why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey.

After replacing the fourth and fifth original monkeys, all the monkeys that have been sprayed with cold water have been replaced. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs. Why not?

Because that's the way it's always been around here.

The Explicit Reflection on Theories

Everyone engages, at times, in their own version of the cardinal’s window bashing. Everyone has the potential to act like the failed shop keeper in the old joke, who was losing money on every sale and tried to make up for it in volume. More of the same, harder and louder, is a common human response to a failed strategy. Most of these failures do not arise because people are mean, vicious, or thoughtless. Like the cardinal, an individual or social group historically produces its implicit theories to accomplish practical ends and they usually work well for the purposes for which they were intended. But not all intentions are positive and, even if they were, environments change, situations change, and implicit theories spread into inappropriate contexts. The homeowner’s immediate response to the cardinal bashing into the window was to draw upon some ancient implicit theories—wanting to kill it, to yell at it, to run after it. But the homeowner can also engage in a more reflective, active, and explicit theorizing process. The cardinal lacked the ability to reflect on the situation, understand the historical development of territoriality or seriously considered other ways of seeing the situation or ways of behaving. But people can do this. Unlike the cardinal, the homeowner was able to step out of the event, reflect on it, and consider alternative conceptions. This contemplative, spectator-like stance is the root of explicit theoretical thinking and offers human beings a unique advantage in dealing with their environments. Explicit theorizing is the act of bringing implicit theories to awareness. It allows the critical assessment of those theories and the opportunity to avoid the repetitive failures experienced by both the cardinal and the new student entering college with a high school mentality.

Explicit theorizing becomes more important in rapidly changing environments. A reflective stance allows the investigation of the social/historical conditions that gave rise to specific way of perceiving and talking a bout the world. It enables discussion about “common sense” and its relation to contemporary contexts. And, most importantly, it enables reasoned choice rather than the reproduction of consent.

Changing Problems, Changing Theories

Everyday implicit theories of communication never arise in a vacuum. They arise out of and used as responses to real problems. Therefore, a theory of communication is not evaluated in terms of its truth or correctness, but rather in terms of its utility to the person holding and using it. The cardinal’s theory should not be considered right or wrong. The theory was tested and, from the cardinal’s perspective, was effective since the other bird did seem to go away. The only problem, from the cardinal’s point of view, was the tenacity of the other bird who returned each time she returned to the branch, thus requiring a harder attack.

Similarly, the problem with the implicit theories drawn upon by new students navigating the unfamiliar terrain of college life is not that the students’ theories are wrong or lacking in confirming instances. Rather, the problem is that their theories can misdirect observation; that is, they do not help the students make the observations and choices that are important to meeting critical goals and needs.

An inadequate theory of communication can be always revised and replaced by a theory that is more adequate. Theory is not fixed. It is not a reflection of some unchanging and universal truth. Theory is a dynamic entity that can change as life circumstances change. The rapidity of contemporary life changes, the growth of interdependence and pluralism, and the rapidity increase of mediation in communication and experience formation all provide significant challenges to everyday communication theories in use.

The Rapidity of Contemporary Life Changes

The usefulness of a theory is always relative to the circumstances in which it is applied. As circumstances change, implicit theories become more or less useful. The problem of our time is that we are living in a period of rapid social and cultural changes. In the not too distant past, people grew up and lived in relatively stable communities. Life revolved around the people in the family, the town, and the local neighborhood. As described in detail in chapter 3, many of our theories were developed in and for that receding world and contemporary societies and their members struggle to invent new and more appropriate ones.

Consider, for example, a boy growing up 50 years ago in a small farm community in Indiana. He would have known everybody he would have needed to know (the teacher, the pastor, the doctor, etc.) to allow him to successfully live the rest of his life. From the perspective of that time, the boy would most likely follow his father into the farming business and take the business over when his father retired. He would conduct his business with a local community of buyers and trade in local markets where he knew personally his suppliers and customers, as well the people who were his competitors. He would become part of a network in which he knew everybody, and everybody knew him. In a community such as this one, a person could live his whole life according to practical theories of life and communication he learned when he was a young child. Fifty years later little of that probably came to pass; the world in which it might have been expected has radically transformed.

People do not, by and large, live in societies like this any more, in any part of the world. In the modern world, things are rapidly and endlessly changing. Today, fewer people live in the community of their parents and fewer still work in their parents’ occupation. Rarely does a person work for their whole lives in the same occupation. People are finding themselves in new situations and circumstances much more regularly than in the past. As a result, important skills and perspectives acquired at one point in life can become dysfunctional as people move into other contexts of life. For example, consider the plight of an engineer, who is excellent in engineering situations, suddenly placed into a management position. Or consider the plight of the graduate student, who is an excellent researcher, suddenly required to teach a class of freshman undergraduate students. Such people quickly find out that skills and expertise acquired in one life situation may not be readily applicable to the new situation in which they find themselves. Just as they get good at something, often it becomes irrelevant. People finally master the courtship process; end up married and needing new skills, only to be mastered; and find themselves in the strange world of older singles.

In the contemporary world the skills and values shared and appropriate to one’s community of origin may be greatly at odds with the globalized and diverse communities in which they now live and work. As a result, they find their practical theories to be always at odds with the constantly changing demands of contemporary society.

The amount of training and development work that will be required in the future will far exceed the typical education that people receive in schools and universities. Corporate analysts have recognized that their employees will constantly need new skills in order to deal with new situations and contexts that are continually being created. The need for more formal education and training reflects both the changes that are taking place and the need for an explicit understanding of what works. Doing things as they have always been done often does not work. New students who behave at college as they would normally behave at home encounter all kinds of problems. Universities and colleges frequently now require new students to enroll in formal courses called “Freshman Seminar” where the nature and expectations of college life are made explicit. Training people to the demands of a new situation, whether it be college life or beginning a new job in a trans-national corporation, demands an explicit understanding of why working in a particular way is better than working in any other way.

Interdependence and Pluralism

People live in a world of high degrees of interdependence today. Such things as pollution do not stay in one locale. They float to other locales; everyone is down stream to someone. Even the basic economy in a farm community in Indiana is dependent upon economic decisions made by people all over the world. Individuals and groups are endlessly thrown into contexts where they are interdependent and dependent upon people all around the world who are not like them. The illusion of a single culture, of my culture being the culture, is shattered endlessly by the need to take into account peoples who think differently.

But our contemporary world is not just characterized by interdependence. Contemporary society defined by migration and social patterns. Contemporary society has become, whether we like it or not, a pluralistic society. Certainly groups exist who would like to round up everybody who is different, whose skin is a different color or who thinks differently, and ship them somewhere else. But while everyone is uncomfortable and challenged in different ways at different times and places, most accept the idea that we are different, we are going to be different, and we have to work it out. This requires very different communication theories-in-use. Most companies know that their survival is not based upon the restriction of people who are different but rather on incorporating people who are different, finding the value added by difference. So interdependence as well as the reality of everyday experience makes it very hard to maintain a sense of homogeneity against the pluralism of the world in which we are placed. Consequently, contemporary societies and their members are confronted with new problems and new opportunities. But phronesis, theories-in-use, have not necessarily kept up. Men and women now work together in most occupations, but courtship scripts still creep into workplaces. Assumption and expectations born of a different time and place with different practical needs are endlessly carried into new contexts.

Most of the basic everyday conceptions of communication were developed in a world different from the contemporary one and were designed to accomplish very different ends. In homogeneous societies individuals communicated from things already agree upon and experiences already shared. Linear models made sense because distribution and signaling already shared meanings was central. In more heterogeneous societies, communication has to construct shared meanings. As developed in Chapter 3 consensus regarding personal identities, social rules, knowledge and values has to be endlessly worked out rather then assumed as existing. People need to be able to talked about, negotiated and collaboratively created these things rather than talked from them as if they were fixed and shared. As communication and the construction of experience becomes more mediated, the nature of these construction and negotiations become more complex and important.

The Growth of Mediation

A major consequence of communication technology, and a defining feature of the contemporary world, is that people predominantly respond to reports of events rather than to events themselves. Historically most of the important aspects of a human experience were based on events individuals actually saw or on the reports of a person they knew that actually saw them. Today, most of the things people respond to in life are not directly experienced. Consider the pictures of the 2005 Asian tsunami or Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans in 2006. People responded to these images and their related reports. Experience is an outcome of reports of events that are manufactured, promoted, and inevitably partial and political. While all experience for all of time in based in interpretive processes, the contemporary situation is different in the extent that interpretation happens in a one step removed mediation—interpretation is of interpretations—and through mediations that are mass produced and widely distributed.

Mediation is not confined to events in other parts of the country or other parts of the world. People who live in a community as small as a university campus read and respond to reports about local campus events in their university newspaper without experiencing these events directly. Viewed in these terms, little difference exists between a report of a speech given by the President of the United States and a report of a speech given by the President of the Student Association. My Space and Facebook endlessly present packages and mediate interpersonal interaction. The world is googled, the road is view endlessly through remote cameras. Face-to-face contact endlessly give way to text messages, photo phones, instant messaging, and so forth. How much does it matter that the principal everyday theories of communication were developed in and for a face-to-face world and used in a world is less and less that way? What reconsiderations are needed? Certainly for one, the politics of experience formation have changed.

The people and institutions preparing these reports and the technologies connecting people to the world are not neutral. They have vested interests in the reports they produce and in the experiences people have. Every camera, every connection highlights and hides, presents an angle or slant. As show later in detail, perception is value laden and promoted. While all experience has always been mediated by the theories-in-use, the language and ways of talking, available to the perceiver, the growth of new second order mediations changes the nature of the relations to the world and to others. Perception is increasingly through purchased technologies to objects, people and events already produced for consumption. Information is produced, constructed, and promoted. Many of the events people respond to today are events that occur purely for the sake of consumption. One of the most visible cases of something like this is the Super Bowl which is organized precisely for the sake of producing an event simply for people to see. It is an event produced entirely for the purpose of its consumption. These events are important, and the nature of pseudo-events has been discussed from some time, but the more important growth of mediation confronts people more like a documentary film than a produced movie. The documentary hides it’s point of view, purports to show the world as it is. Life is less lived in the world and more lived in the “documented” world.

The ubiquitous nature of mediated experiences has significant consequences for the nature of theorizing in everyday life. Implicit communication theories now have to take into account the produced and mediated experiences whose rules and expectations are different from direct encounters. The understanding of the social processes of production enables choices that cannot occur without such understandings.

Issues of trust become more difficult and different. In an earlier time, people developed and shared experiences amongst their friendship groups who they trusted and believed. Theories in use lead to the identification of deception and credibility derived from their experiences within the context of close interpersonal relationships. However, these concepts do not translate well to an environment of mediated events. In the mediated case, it is common to see situations where people are prepared to appear credible; that is, they have been trained to give off signals that do not appear to be deceptive. The very skills that have been developed so carefully to judge credibility and deception in a friendship context are now used by professionals to manipulate those judgments. People are now faced with a context where they need to have a very different skill to understand what is believable. In a managed media event, people may perceive the wrong person as being deceptive because the cues being given off by a person who feels awkward when they are telling the truth are read as being signs of deception. On the other hand, presenters who are highly skilled may not be read as being deceptive when in fact they are. Truth-telling becomes a very carefully orchestrated and developed presentation skill. In these cases, implicit theories of credibility and deception do not match the mediated situations with which people are presented. Skills developed in an interpersonal context do not and can not match the judgments that have to be made in mediated contexts. Even in the interpersonal context, people are endlessly told by online dating services that the system can make better choices than the person can in every day life. As people become more immersed in mediated communication situations, the more critical it becomes for them to develop different theories and skills that will allow them to respond successfully to these kinds of events. To do so requires a much deeper understanding of the social production and politics of experience. And, different normative standards and moral guidance for judging the quality of communication. These become core issues for a democratic society and serve as the core issues in this book.

Conclusion

Theorizing is a part of our everyday lives. Implicit theories enables people to make sense to the world and to respond to it in systematic and coherent ways. Everyday theorizing is tied to the problems people and societies face, whether that be a cardinal crashing into out window every morning in the hope of protecting a territory or the consequences of a world increasingly defined in terms of rapid change, globalization, pluralism, mediation and the need to make good decisions together. As circumstances and social contexts shift, theorizing needs to shift with them. However, the majority of everyday theorizing is historically derived, developed in response to difference circumstances and problems and remains implicit, invisible and common-sensical. In a world of rapid change, rapid technology development, and mediated communication, common sense views of the world often advantage some groups at the expense of others or become increasingly dysfunctional. Making explicit those theories and, more importantly, understanding the communication processes by which those theories are created and sustained is critical for human choice. This will require the articulation of a higher order theory of communication, one that can describe how our implicit theories come to be formed, agreed upon and changed.

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[1] Aristotle (2004). The Nicomachean ethics (J. A. K. Thomson, Trans., Revised by Hugh Tredennick). New York, NY: Penguin Books.

[2] Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz (1987). Campus life: Undergraduate cultures from the end of the Eighteenth century to the present. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

[3] Miller, Thomas, Bender, Barbara E., Schuh, John H., and Associates (2005). Promoting reasonable expectations: Aligning student and institutional views of the college experience. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

[4] Miller, Thomas E. (2005). Introduction. In Miller, Thomas, Bender, Barbara E., Schuh, John H., and Associates (2005). Promoting reasonable expectations: Aligning student and institutional views of the college experience (pp. 1-9). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.